Friday, May 19, 2017

Flynn-Trump witch hunt is McCarthyism reloaded

What our finance minister Mr Babiš has been doing – and how our president has provided him with his marginally unconstitutional support – was pretty bad but in recent days, I was reminded of the poor level of the political culture in the world's only superpower. Some of the events that have followed Trump's decision to fire the FBI's boss Comey look incredible to me.

Under a Washington Times article about some events, I added my vote "Yes, it's the greatest witch hunt in the U.S. history". 77% of the readers of that news outlet have answered in this way. I answered not because I am certain that it's the greatest one – I have also been to the Salem, Massachusetts museum of the literal witch hunts ;-) which is another fact that makes me uncertain – but it seems as the greatest witch hunt among the obvious ones I can think of right now.

The Washington Times article says that an investigation of Comey's departure has turned into a "criminal investigation". In a similar context, what can this phrase possibly mean outside a banana republic? The only act that has taken place is Trump's "you're fired" for Comey which was partly powered by Trump's dissatisfaction with Comey's harassment of Flynn that the president considered inappropriate. And so did I: if I were the U.S. president, I would probably order waterboarding of those who gave Mr Flynn such a hard time for no good reason. It seems utterly obvious to me that according to the laws, Trump has had the right to fire Comey – he has extracted this political power directly from the American electorate. Aside from Trump, no one else has done anything that would matter.

You may easily convince yourself that the U.S. president cannot be sued for any official act while president nor he can be prosecuted for a crime. The only events analogous to such prosecution of the U.S. president involve the impeachment by the House of Representatives followed by a trial and conviction by the Senate. Without these events, you need to wait for the next president's Inauguration Day.

These facts were established by the Supreme Court case Nixon vs Fitzgerald 1982. It looks funny to continental Europeans like me when such elementary questions are being answered by a seemingly esoteric and isolated recent lawsuit. In Czechia, the safety of the president is guaranteed by the Article 65 of the constitution.

A Mr Mueller is said to be capable of running the investigation. The Washington Times wrote:

Those charges could include intimidation of witnesses, perjury, destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice.

What? Who was supposed to have done these things? According to the basic legal facts and principles, the president couldn't have committed such a crime so it makes absolutely no sense to launch a criminal investigation into such matters.

The underlying "sin" that is said to justify similar witch hunts against Donald Trump is the "Russia collusion story". Even if the U.S. president weren't immune from the criminal prosecution, all these statements would be absolutely ludicrous. Even if there existed any evidence of a "collusion", and I don't think that there exists one, the president and the presidential candidate undoubtedly has the right to cooperate with a country that he considers an ally or a potential ally. Trump has considered Russia a potential or emergent ally.

Hillary was no different, she just had different allies such as some folks in Saudi Arabia and Brussels. Any U.S. citizen has the right to think that Russians are better than the Saudis and EU apparatchiks, or worse than the Saudis and the EU apparatchiks, but it is spectacularly obvious that this personal preference cannot serve as a basis for some selective terror against a politician who cooperates or is accused of cooperating with Russia.

Many people in the U.S. may have been brainwashed to hate Russia or they suffer from some serious Russophobia. But it must be emphasized that this condition is their personal psychiatric defect. It is certainly not something that would give them some special legal or constitutional rights, especially not against the president. Just check the constitution or any laws that actually hold in the U.S. There is nothing that would indicate that the cooperation with the Saudis or the unelected officials in Brussels is legally above the cooperation with the Kremlin. If you don't realize this rather elementary fact, it indicates that you are incompatible with the very basic building blocks of the rule of law in the U.S.

Two days ago, Ann Coulter wrote that every time she tries to be mad at Trump, the media pull her back. She has addressed some other "damning stories" about Trump that the crippled media have offered their readers in recent days. One of the "damning accusations" was that Trump has leaked some "amazing, classified secret" to some Russians. What is the secret? It's the finding that Muslims could detonate airplanes by notebooks. Cool.

Now, how stupid you have to be for Trump's credibility to decrease in your eyes after you read similar garbage? First of all, the U.S. president has the unquestionable right to declassify – which is the better word for "leaking" – anything he finds appropriate. Second, even if he didn't have the right, everyone knows that Muslims may want to use heavy objects similar to laptops to blow up planes. Some form of this finding may be formally classified but the broader point is obvious to everybody with a brain.

Coulter also discussed the amazing distortion of Trump's "negative sentences about the co-existence with Muslims". He has repeatedly stated that he has no problems with Muslims and he could name one to his administration. He is just solving a security problem. The likes of The New York Timers never report these things honestly. As Peter Thiel said, the media take Trump literally, but not seriously, while the people take him seriously, but not literally. (Copy-and-paste was useful to write the previous sentence.)

I would also subscribe to Michael Reagan's, Lou Dobbs', and others' statement that what Trump generously calls a witch hunt is nothing else than an attempted coup. The leftists and Russophobes haven't been satisfied with ruining the political culture, prosperity, and even peace in countries like Ukraine – they want to do such things in the U.S. as well.

In Czechia, it was President Zeman who was recently closest to some unconstitutional behavior. He was hesitating before he fired the finance minister, billionaire Babiš, even though the constitution and constitutional lawyers say that he's obliged to do so (quickly) after the prime minister fires a minister. This government crisis is "basically solved" as all the relevant people agreed to replace Babiš with another man from his party (i.e. with a puppet – but in the case of this lawmaker, probably not necessarily the most obedient puppet of Babiš's; Mr Ivan Pilný has been a Microsoft executive, too). But in the U.S., it seems to be a coalition of many anti-Trump folks who are behaving unconstitutionally.

On Wednesday, the apparent danger of a removal of Trump has led to the biggest drop of the U.S. stock market indices since the Trump victory (the stocks seem to be licking their wounds in the following days). You can see that whenever Trump is threatened, so is the stock market – while eorge Soros makes a profit. If you want to wreck the U.S., the American economy, and the world economy, and help the likes of George Soros, keep on working on your utterly indefensible witch hunts.

Related: Among other things in the Klaus Institute's newsletter and elsewhere, I just read (a Czech translation of) Caldwell's text How To Think About Putin which explains why Russians generally love him (what he did to end the destructive 1990s in Russia etc.) and the Western globalist leftists hate him.